http://www.robcwegman.org/midi.zip

These are the MIDI files of the website Renaissance Masses 1440-1520 (http://www.robcwegman.org/mass.htm).  The aim of this website, created in 2004-2010, was to publish serviceable sound recordings of all surviving Mass cycles and Mass movements from the eighty years between 1440 and 1520. According to the master list of “All Known Masses,” on the same website, we know of at least 689 settings today. A dozen or two of these are lost, and known by title only. Still other lost Masses are known by composer only; these are not included in the list.  By 2010 I had keyed in altogether 240 Masses, about 35%.  The 18MB zip file posted at the link below contains the corresponding MIDI files.

The files are free and can be used and circulated without restriction. However, they do not have the authority of scholarly editions.  While transcribing and keying in the Masses, I made any and all emendations of the counterpoint that seemed necessary, but I did not report them. Obviously one doesn’t want to perform or print this music with alterations that cannot be accounted for. so I strongly urge proofreading against the source or a least a printed edition.

With regard to ficta, the guiding principle was that immortal line of Duke Ellington: “when it sounds good, it is good.” So I added ficta whenever I felt it sounded better that way, and I didn’t when I could hear no worthwhile improvement. But ficta is a bit like the salt you use to season a dish.  If you use it sparingly, then a generously seasoned dish will taste unbearably salty, but if you are used to more generous helpings of salt, then a lightly salted dish will taste like nothing at all.  After several years of working on 14th-century music my feeling is that there can never be enough ficta in life. So I would probably have used a lot more of it in the Mass recordings.  I was definitely too conservative in “d minor” music of the 1450s.

On the other hand, I think that differences in taste would have been just as pronounced in the fifteenth century.  If you were to travel, say, from Bruges to Santiago de Compostela in 1490, I’m sure you’d be hearing the same piece of music in different ficta interpretations in cities along the way, and sometimes on successive days in the same city.  There was no musicology police patrolling the camino and enforcing uniformity.  We’d probably also be hearing the music performed at different speeds, at different pitches, and with styles of voice production that varied significantly from one region to the next.  A given motet might be attributed to Josquin in one place, Brumel in the next, Prioris in the one after that, and be of unknown authorship by the time you got to Galicia.  A knowledgeable pilgrim might helpfully point out that the attribution to Josquin was in fact the correct one, but of course that’s the one thing nobody would believe, not even if the pilgrim happened to be Josquin in very person.

One thing I can categorically say, based at least on the archival evidence that I have seen, is that no musical center would have chosen to have a Mass performed with one singer to part when in fact they had multiple singers in each range.  You don’t leave singers in the dugout especially if you have the money to pay them, but even when you haven’t, due to a temporary shortfall of funds.  In 15th-century sacred polyphony, at least until about 1490 (and in England well beyond that date), there is no virtue in a musical starvation diet.

Another thing that is somewhat like salt in a dish is tempo.  In early music performance everybody seems to be craving faster speeds nowadays.  But as the project evolved I found myself picking slower and slower tempos, mainly because I heard the music increasingly in terms of its handling of sonority.  That may seem paradoxical when the MIDI sounds are synthesized, and the eventual recordings put together from vocal patches.  But within those limitations you can still make fine discriminations between one sonority and another—once again on Duke Ellington’s principle that when it sounds good, it is good.  There is a clear difference between composers for whom every moment represents an opportunity for sonority that should not go wasted, and composers who are content to have the counterpoint move from point A to point B, without being always exactly sure why point B is worth moving to.  Suffice it to say that to my ears it was rewarding to hear the sonorities for what they are, and slower tempi made that possible.

On the few occasions I’ve listened to the old sound recordings on my website, I got distracted by the slow tempi before I had a chance to savor the sonorities that were meant to benefit from them. But for my own work even the slowest recordings are more useful than the speed contests you hear on many commercially available recordings nowadays. There are ensembles who, for all their good intentions, manage to destroy the music of every composer who crosses their path.  It makes me sad that there are multiple CDs of my favorite composers that are simply unlistenable.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who love such performances, and I am perfectly happy to accept that I may just be being the cranky old professor here.  Good thing I’m not a reviewer, then.  I express my opinions for what they are worth, but would not dream of imposing restrictions on others, especially not in using these MIDI files. There has to room for all opinions.  That’s how we received this music from the past, and that’s how we should hand it down to future generations.

http://www.robcwegman.org/midi.zip